President Trump on Friday castigated Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is investigating the Cornell sex assault case, as a “corrupt person,” and said that anyone she is scrutinizing probably would not get “a fair shake.”
A day earlier, before Ms. James was put in charge of the investigation, Mr. Trump said he did not know much about the case. “Cornell is a fine school, and I’m sure they’ll do what’s right,” he told reporters.
His comments on Friday were in response to a question about Ms. James’s involvement in the inquiry. Mr. Trump has a fraught history her. In 2022, while running for re-election, Ms. James, a Democrat, brought a fraud case against him and his family.
“I feel badly for whoever she’s looking at, because they won’t get a fair shake,” Mr. Trump said, when asked about the decision by Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, to appoint Ms. James as a special prosecutor in the case. “Letitia James is a corrupt person.”
Ms. James’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
A woman referred to in court documents as Jane Doe has sued Cornell over an alleged sexual assault at a fraternity in 2024. Prosecutors reopened the case this week, and Ms. James was appointed to investigate it on Friday.
For Mr. Trump, Ms. James’s involvement was enough to call the entire investigation into question. En route to a rally in Alabama, Mr. Trump jumped onto social media and sent another missive using an insulting nickname for Ms. James: “Why would the Governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, appoint a Corrupt Prosecutor, Letitia “Peekaboo” James, to represent the State in the highly controversial Cornell University rape case?”
Ms. James has become a major political target of Mr. Trump’s second-term retribution campaign, animated by the president’s belief that the justice system was weaponized against him. Ms. James ultimately won the fraud case against Mr. Trump when a New York judge held him liable for conspiring to manipulate his net worth. A half-billion-dollar judgment against Mr. Trump was thrown out last year.
Three months into Mr. Trump’s second term, Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, sent a criminal referral letter to the Justice Department, saying that Ms. James “appeared to have falsified records” related to properties in Virginia and New York to receive favorable loan terms.
In August 2025, the Justice Department opened an investigation into Ms. James’s office, examining whether it had violated Mr. Trump’s civil rights with the fraud lawsuit. Two months later, Ms. James was indicted on bank fraud. A federal judge dismissed the charges against her last November, though federal prosecutors have tried several times to revive the case. Ms. James has called the charges baseless.
Jason Goldman, a criminal defense lawyer and a former prosecutor based in New York, said that the Cornell case had prompted both Republicans and Democrats to weigh in without knowing all of the facts.
“What’s concerning is the increasing willingness of powerful political figures to insert themselves into high-profile matters before due process has run its course, inevitably tainting the proceedings,” Mr. Goldman said. “In Trump’s case, given his longstanding conflict with Tish James, his comments risk looking less like a defense of fairness and more like political retaliation.”
Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.
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